Jessie Ede Blog 2 "Where Are You From?"

When people ask me where I'm from, I answer with my home state - Iowa. Sometimes. Other times, when I anticipate a comment about being far from home or just want to blend, I say I'm from Northern Virginia because my parents moved there my freshman year at William and Mary so it is where I live even if it's not where I grew up. At the beginning of elementary school, I told people I was from Arizona because that's where I had moved from, even though I was born in Iowa - just not the small town where we'd moved. The "where are you from" question always struck me as needlessly complicated - people should answer where they were born or grew up and that was that. My mom's family is exclusively from the Netherlands (as far as anyone knows, that is) and my dad comes from early American settlers of the English/Irish/Scottish type. Claiming any of those nations as where I'm "from" feels inauthentic, though, because America is the only country in which I have ever lived. Aside from an appreciation of Dutch cuisine gained from my grandmother's cooking, I don't feel any intense connection with any of the countries my ancestors immigrated from.
The first time I thought seriously about how people categorize one another based on their nationality was after talking to my boyfriend's mom. She immigrated here from South Korea in the 1980s, and came home livid after a man she was helping at work asked her, "What are you?" Her response stuck with me: "I'm a human being. What are you?" She said she doesn't mind people asking where she's from since she does speak English with a slight accent, the easiest giveaway (in my mind, at least) that she has not always lived in America, but phrasing mattered in a way I never encountered before. As a white girl from a predominately white area (the number of minorities in my school could be easily counted, and the most exotic transplants were from Minnesota), I grew up around people who were exclusively born in the United States. Asking people where they were from meant which town or state, not which country or about their ancestry. I understand it is a far more complicated question for other people, and I love hearing their perspectives because it's a vantage point into society that I just do not have.